Sylvia's Journal

The workweek started with a thousand big and small tasks swirling around my head. I am still trying to catch up on an entire work week missed while I was in Herat; from 300 virgin emails down to 75 and back up to 200. Sisyphus comes to mind.

The ministry is slowly coming out of its leadership transition limbo and things are moving again. The National Health Retreat, pushed onto the back burner until May is being pulled back to the front burner again, adding some intensity to our work. The cast of characters has changed rather substantively and I am wondering whether the painstaking process of setting the agenda was all for naught. But such is the process of capacity building and teaching about organizational process: it’s live! One step forward, two back. The good thing is that we are moving again; moving two steps back may be better than not moving at all.

We are going to try once again to start a senior leadership program with the new top team – another one of those steps forward that has to be retraced again with a new cast. I remember thinking we had a breakthrough when we finally sat down with the previous minister about the challenges of leadership at the top. That was in December. Now we are back to square one but this time I am addressing a she rather than a he and the new dynamics between key players hasn’t had a chance to set yet – the pudding is still soft and warm. Everything is possible, or is it?

Sara has started her last week of her assignment and is suddenly worried about the days flying by and there is so much to do – I sense some guilt mixed in about not being as productive as home office people are expected to be. But this is an orientation I tell her and it is part of the work – the pace, hectic as it may be, is different here, the deliverable always in flux. What was up one day is down the next and whole plans get scrapped when priorities change. We are but a small player in a large drama.

A cold spell has hit Kabul as if the winter finally realized it hadn’t done its job yet. The rabbit fur feet muffs that I had thrown into the container at the last minute are coming in handy. I was going to give them away but now I think I am holding on to them a little longer; I too work in a place that is all cement and heats poorly, especially the floor.

Axel is still teaching his young students every day, spinning Martin Luther King’s Dream speech into a long string of conversations about vision, responsibility, minority/majority conflicts, social abuses and what would you do if you were seeing injustice committed right in front of your eyes. He does this in an essentially unheated room coming home chilled to the bone.

And so I reminded him about weather and inappropriate clothing: it is time for long underwear, wool socks and lamb’s wool slippers. Here people seem to have a higher tolerance for the cold – in Dari you are not cold, you ingest it – because they are used to it during the long winter. In most houses only the essential places are heated (main room). We consider a bathroom essential but that’s one room that doesn’t to be heated anywhere except in our house where a visit to the bathroom makes you think you are in the Sahara desert at high noon.